Mergesort - Is Bottom-Up faster than Top-Down?

Question

I\'ve been reading \"Algorithms, 4th Ed\" by Sedgewick & Wayne, and along the way I\'ve been implementing the algorithms discussed in JavaScript.

I recently took the

Answer 1

I had asked the same question on coursera class forums for the 2012 August edition of this course. Professor Kevin wayne (of Princeton) replied that in many cases recursion is faster than iteration because of caching improved performances.

So the short answer that I got at that time was that top down merge sort will be faster than bottom up merge sort because of caching reasons.

Please note that the class was taught in Java programming language(not Javascript).